What’s a misled Nation to do?

Many things, not just one

Many thoughtful responses have arrived overnight to my latest Field Note (find it here) about President Trump’s shabby handling of the Abrega Garcia deportation nightmare. The comments (via email and courageous comments on this site) have boiled down to this one heart-felt question:

What can alarmed citizens do now to counteract a reckless, fumbling but defiant, vengeful new President who looks determined to upend the world order, our economy, and our Constitution?

These are not belly-aches from rabble-rousers, but urgent thoughts and questions from US citizens who feel an existential urgency. I’ve been pondering it - as we all must.

One initial impulse, though premature, is to think we must find one consultant who has the skills to organize a broad-based “campaign” of opposition. Over my career, I have known such individuals who design winning political campaigns and local referenda. But our society, in my view, needs to do something else first.

I’m thinking this morning that this current emergency that Washington lets happen requires both more and less than the conventional political approach. One problem is that traditional campaign organizers can’t help but be locked into only ONE side of our binary political party system. It’s a rigid system that has miserably failed most Americans, especially now. It’s a thicket that leads us nowhere now.

On the contrary, the best next movement to help counter-balance what the Trump White House is doing to our nation and its norms will likely come from a hundred sources, maybe a thousand, using modern tools and also some old ones. This is no longer about waiting on Washington to restore fundamental groundedness that has generally disappeared in our national life, especially in Washington but also in the political party structures that drive who gets elected to serve there.

Instead, maybe what’s needed now are hundreds of new citizen strategies, springing up from meetings in a hundred cities, towns and neighborhoods. Maybe a thousand. I have a friend who has been organizing a global initiative called “Millions of Conversations.” It’s designed to bring thoughtful citizens together to think creatively about what ought to come next. This model could generate collaborative lessons for working past this dark time in our nation.

At the right time, our elected officials should eventually become part of this broader and deeper conversation, to the extent they are capable and willing to so in their own districts and towns.

We should be willing to lift up and celebrate the good role-models among them. This is not about Washington but ourselves and the values we hold dear.

We should praise and commend good role models like Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. He is a Democrat who took it on himself to go down to El Salvador this week and check on his constituent Abrega Garcia, the man who had been spirited away by the Trump administration with no due process and flown to a notorious prison. (Van Hollen’s courage in doing what he did this week gives us hope for reviving a more just government, and makes him a model worthy of broad support now.)

On the contrary, I do not think of Tennessee’s two Republican senators: Blackburn and Hagerty. Like most other Republicans in the current Washington majority, they do not help in this civic emergency but keep their heads way down, avoiding any action or statement that Trump does not bless in advance. In their silence, of course they enable his worst impulses.

We should remember that not one thing but many things have gone wrong in the first 100 days of dystopian leadership in our nation’s White House - grossly threatening what we once knew as norms of our American Way of Life. The list goes on, and grows daily.

To restore sanity and some genuine hope to our larger system - and, in turn, to stir hope for a more sensible government - we need not one strategy but many, arising from smart thinking at the grassroots in our cities and towns and neighborhoods.

As in the American Revolution, the effective Resistance now must first stir in the hearts and minds of the American people - not by surrendering to the whims of an out-of-touch monarch and his agents.

But time grows short for this essential work. And it will not be done with only one idea but many, smartly done, to remind the world that Americans and our spirit have not been lost.

What do you think? Please share in the Comments.

© 2025 Keel Hunt